With three weeks to go til the New Zealand general election, polls have revealed Jacinda Ardern, the newly installed Labour leader, to be out the front. So who is the 37 year old ex-Mormon/DJ/policy adviser to Tony Blair who might be the next NZ PM? 

A policeman’s daughter who grew up in small town NZ and was raised Mormon, Ardern says she briefly considered joining the police like her dad or becoming a psychologist, but by age 17 she was already a member of the Labour youth wing and helping her aunt out on election campaigns.

Fun fact No. 1: Ardern left the Church of Latter Day Saints in 2005, saying it conflicted with her personal views, particularly her support of gay rights.

After completing a bachelor of communications she worked as a policy adviser to Tony Blair and was seconded to work for the Home Office. Returning to NZ in 2008 she entered Parliament and, aged 28, was at that time the youngest ever sitting MP.

She describes herself as “youth adjacent” rather than young but — fun fact No.2 — she did a DJ set at Laneway in 2014. 

Naysayers have tried to highlight her youth and inexperience, but she is tougher politically than many of the older men she is currently stepping over in the polls. Notably for the over 600,000* New Zealanders (*Barnaby Joyce not incl.) living in Australia, she didn’t give two shits when Julie Bishop creatively accused the NZ Labour Party of high treason and stated she would find it difficult to work with a Labour-led NZ government.

For those thousands of New Zealanders who are being screwed by Australia’s flip flops on permanent residency, having a potential PM who won’t just adjourn to the Australian Club with Malcolm when it gets too hard to negotiate a fraction of the same benefits that Australians living in New Zealand enjoy, Ardern’s lack of shits was rather exciting.

Ardern’s fluency with the media is the key to understanding how quickly she pulled Labour up from nine years of low polling results and constant leadership casting calls.  

NZ is very small — 4 million people, two islands roughly the size of the UK, but with fewer sheep and more vineyards than when you first started telling the sheep jokes. 

Those working in politics and/or journalism run into each other fairly regularly, and that’s assuming they aren’t cousins or dating. At her first press conference as Labour leader in August, Ardern called on each journalist by first name in an act of such sterling smoothness that she had several lifetime malcontents basically wanting to braid her hair and swap mix tapes.

Watch this interview from earlier in the year to see just how good she is at the light stuff. But underestimate her ability to deliver a serious smackdown at your peril, as radio host Mark Richardson discovered. 

Less than 24 hours after she had been elected leader Richardson said she should tell New Zealanders if she planned to have babies “because employers should know that sort of thing”.

Fun fact No 3: Under the Human Rights Act it’s actually illegal to ask those questions of a woman in a job interview in New Zealand, and Ardern updated Richardson’s general knowledge of NZ human rights law in an interview that went viral internationally.

Finally, fun fact No 4: The last Labour PM in NZ was Helen Clark, and Ardern cites her as a massive influence but is quite happy to do her impression of Clark’s legendarily deep voice. That takes some Obama or Trudeau-standard levity to pull off. 

The ruling National Party are right to be worried that Ardern is actually some dark-ops test tube raised child assassin here to disrupt their nine-year reign. For the rest of us, the election has become a contest worth watching.